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MORE MORRIS

Today's "movie" continuing with Errol Morris' First Person, a collection of 30-45 minute interviews with interesting people or situations.

Actually, beyond interesting.

Take today.

I watched a woman who had been the girl friend of a guy who became a serial killer after they were together. Later, while writing a book with this first guy, she met a second serial killer in the same prison and fell in love with him.

Wow.

You don't see that every day.

Then, a guy who is fascinated with crionics, the freezing of the body before or just after death on the chance that in a hundred, two hundred, or more years they will have figured out a way to resuscitate these people who wanted their bodies frozen. Crazy. Well, not if you are him. He has had his mother's head frozen and got in trouble right here in my county, Riverside, was finally released and still has the mom hidden in case they want to take her away from him.

Then we have, not the guy who "went postal" and killed a bunch of people in his post office, but this killer's boss who was blamed by the union for bad working conditions and pilloried into a dead end job, career in tatters as a result. He is not happy about it. They say he was autocratic and a little hitler. He did look like a bit of a shit but still.

Then the story of a murder in which a key witness was a parrot who was in the room at the time. The principles talk at length about who was there and not there and so on. The judge threw the parrot's testimony out. He said "no no Richard" over and over. Richard was the perp's name. Also the name of the kid in the family before. Could'a been his mom.

Finally, the best one, bar none. Perhaps the best I have seen. Gretchen Worden, the director of the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia where thousands of exhibits of medical anomalies are stored and exhibited. They have the only plaster casts of the siamese twins Cnag and Eng. Most of the exhibits are the real thing. In bottles or skeletal remains. Worden has a great sense of humor and a deep respect for her work and her charges. It was a thoroughly enjoyable interview. I read that she has since died. Morris asks her if she would like to be exhibited. I do not know if she is on show or not. The interview sure came across very well.

I am in the first part of two out of three discs.

Labels: films